HOW TO ENRICH VOCABULARY

Communication is important for all human interactions. Effective communication has many benefits and therefore enhances our personal as well as professional lives.

One way of effective communication is enriching the vocabulary. Words are like the currency of any kind of communication, and a communication cannot be effective if we ourselves do not know the meaning of words that we use. A good vocabulary helps in improving the other areas of communication as well. These include speaking, listening writing and reading. When in a Group discussion, the judges give you score on the basis of your communication and expression.

There are a number of ways by which a person can learn vocabulary while preparing for his Group discussion. These ways are:

1.Learning while reading.

2.Learning the vocabulary while listening to a speech, commercial, presentation, etc.

3.Learning vocabulary while writing and using the newly learned words in writing papers, essays, letters, etc.

4.Learning vocabulary while using the newly learned words in their speech.

The way the person uses his vocabulary in all these styles, also help others in knowing how intelligent the person is.

Building and enriching vocabulary:

When students prepare for their entrance exams and group discussion, the need for enriched and strong vocabulary skill arises. People find it difficult to learn and retain new words. Rather, learning vocabulary is much easier then learning mathematics formulae.

The only criteria for learning vocabulary for your entrance exams and group discussion is that, you must be eager to search for new words. Write them down whenever you hear or read them, be active to look out for their meaning in the dictionary and try to absorb them. The main problem with almost all people is that even we read and learn new words; we are unable to apply them at the right time and at the right place.

The different ways via which you can enrich vocabulary are:

•The first and foremost important is that one must love words in order to increase their vocabulary.

•From where ever you are learning new vocabulary, remember to set a target. That is, set a target that you are going to learn 5, 10, 12, etc words today along with their meaning and some synonyms. Practice these words the whole day and then, before learning the next set of words the next day, write down what you learned yesterday. Don’t just limit your revision till yesterday but continue this exercise for at least 5-6 days or till the time you haven’t completely learned that set of words. For starting, limit your target to 3-5 words a day and if you practice regularly, you can add almost 12-35 new words in just 5 days!!!! And in a month, it would be 90 – 150 words! This is not at all bad.

•Search for the meaning of new words, whenever you hear or read them. Read their meaning as many times as you can so that their definition stays in your mind.

•Whenever you read or hear a new word, don’t just limit you’re to reading its meaning, but try and find out its synonyms as well as antonyms. Sometime, these synonyms and antonyms would help you in understanding the meaning of the words rather than their actual meaning given in the dictionary. This can even help you in coming across newer words that you can learn.

•There are number of sites available in which just by signing into the site would let you receive a new word with its meaning, synonym, and antonyms to your mobile phone or your email.

•While preparing for MBA and while studying it, everyone says that you must read the newspapers. Well, if you are really reading the newspapers, your vocabulary will automatically increase provide that you have the commitment to look up for the meaning of new words that you come across while reading a article, etc. for this, keep a dictionary along with you while reading the newspaper.

•Playing games like word power etc, sometime seems very kiddish, but these are a great way of learning and retaining new words. Play scrabble, boggle, etc.

•Apply the newly learned vocabulary to your speech. Try and use the words while you are communicating with anyone.

•All coaching centres and books suggest the students to learn the prefixes, suffixes and roots of words. This is really helpful. You can actually understand the meaning of the words by just breaking them into prefix, main words and the suffixes.

Benefits & application:

Expanding the vocabulary with the help of above given tips help an aspirant in performing better in the English section of their entrance exams which contain a huge pool words that we never heard off. Learning vocabulary would be really beneficial in question that straight ask the meaning of the given words, or finding the word that has the given meaning. It also helps in comprehending statements and paragraphs are difficult to understand.

The area where these words would leave a great mark are the group discussions. Ensure that you don’t use very difficult words as this would result in negative marking. Use words that we come across many time in our lives, but never make an attempt to search for their meaning. During a GD , use the words that are more sophisticated than their easy versions. For example, if talking about the GDP, etc, use ‘funds’, ‘investments’,’ finance’ etc instead of using “money”. For this, practice is very important.